This describes almost everyone I know. (Maybe that's why I spend time here).
OP, however, never mentions the most important thing about this demographic: they just want it to work.
They expect things to work intuitively right out of the box. They don't want to install any add-ons, extensions, or downloads. And they don't want to have to get an education just to try something new.
The gas pedal is always on the right and when you enter a room, flip the toggle switch up to get light.
So why doesn't your web app work like that? If it doesn't work right with the browser and resolution they got when they bought their computer at Office Depot, if they have to wait for Flash, or they don't know what it is, they'll leave and never come back.
This is the 80% in the middle of the bell curve, and they do have money to spend. Pay attention.
They expect things to work intuitively right out of the box
20% or so of mobile handsets are returned to the shop. Rarely are they defective but just too difficult to use correctly. (The percentage varies by handset, I can't find the article I learnt this from at the moment)
Yes they are. I can't think of a phone that I've actively liked beyond the iPhone. Voyager? Not even close. And apparently people think that's a good phone, too.
The bar for a good cell phone is vary low. I really liked my SCH-A990 because it worked well as a phone and you could use it as a 3MP camera but while it was better than average its interface sucked.
To take a picture you open the phone, rotate the display, close it an it looks like a normal digital camera with a 2 inch LCD on the back and a nice large button on the top right to take photos. Now all you need to open the shutter your ready to take pictures.
But, while that button takes photo's with a short click, by holding it down you can go to movie mode and take movies. So then if you did a short click that same button wold start and stop taking movies or if you held it down again it would go back to pictures. Who on earth thought that up? Nobody I handed the camera to knew how to work it without messing it up several times. But, most of them still thought it was a Great cell phone.
I felt Tivo made it mainstream when I overheard a kid in the suburbs ask their daddy why they couldn't pause the movie.
I usually keep a tab open to summize (my city as search term), and I've been noticing a lot more 'normal' people talking about life as opposed to technology. Also, notice that most of them have less than 100 followers (as opposed to the pied piper Scobelizer-types 5k+ followers and Scobelizer-wannabees 1k+ followers). It would be interesting to see the distribution of followers on Twitter. My hunch is that as Twitter goes more mainstream there will be more normal people (with 20-30 followers).
I think the idea is that early adopters can evangelize your product and create its foothold, but it's the late adopters who play mass market kingmakers.
this is key. Look at Google. they target technical types, but for joe average, their product is just as usable as the compitition, who explicitly targets the average user.
Joe average is going to have a technical person setup his computer- If that technical person, say, makes firefox the default browser, assuming it mostly works, joe average is going to use firefox. This might also be why OSX is doing so much better than previous macOS versions. Whenever a non-technical person asks me for a laptop reccomendation, I tell them to get a mac, in part because I know they might come to me for help (and I'll be damned if I start rooting around in a windows box that isn't properly backed up. Reboot, reboot, then format and reinstall, I say.)
the other side of this is that it needs to work for joe average... this is why Linux on the desktop took so long to take off (it looks like it's getting a toehold in the low-end- by 'just working' for simple tasks) even now, linux on the desktop only 'just works' if you don't need commercial software.
so yeah, you must target the early adoptors, but targeting the early adoptors alone is not enough. You must make it usable for the average person.
(which is funny, because I've put almost zero effort into the usability of my product. I don't have a support budget, so if you don't know UNIX well, eh, for now I'm not the best product for you.)
"Look at Google. they target technical types, but for joe average, their product is just as usable as the compitition, who explicitly targets the average user."
Do you mean search? Its not the case that yahoo or live search targets only at average ppl. It very well targets you and me too. On the other hand with Gmail, it targets only at savvy ppl. People are not used to conversations or tagging or archiving.
I once tried to imagine what one of those people was thinking and i felt a strong vacuum in the right part of mi brain. I don't know if anyone of you was ever asked himself what makes these people different. Weren't we the different ones? These people are boring, they live in their own worlds. Thats probably exactly what they think of us :D We understand nerds problems because we are nerds and these problems are our own. But we don't understand normal peoples problems, because they are not our problems. Our best shot is at the common stuff(communication is the most common) In this case we are trapped. We can search for ordinary peoples problems and solve them with software, but those are not our problems and we don't understand them. How are we to know if we are not solving it wrongly? Or if we are solving a completely different problem in a really messed up way? So here is my best shot at it. Get a boring job, get married, have kids and get stupid. Have problems and then get smart again, get divorced and start working to solve the problem. Sounds ridiculous right? :D Boring people not always have boring problems, but they can seem boring if you don't understand them. Im sure average Joe thinks solving the problem with multi-core processors is boring too.
If you have a way to make multi-core processors improve the speed of day-to-day tasks, then all the "average Joe" has to know if that it makes his computer faster. And because that's something that he does care about, you have a $100 million idea.
It's absurd to think that there are no real-world problems which have interesting solutions. To say that you can't understand what more "average" people would find useful is not an assertion of your superior intelligence, just an assertion that you're not particularly perceptive or curious.
Maybe you could make some non-nerd friends and ask them for their input? Although, with the elitist attitude you exhibited in your comment, I can see how that might be difficult.
I'm not sure I agree with this description.
In my experience, there are quite a lot of people sharing photos online.
There are very few people willing to pay for software (that is not already bundled with their hardware).
"They believe that a wild horde of malcontented hackers are watching their every move in unchartered internet waters. . This is most conspicuously manifested in their distrust of giving their credit card information over a webform."
Though something like 5% of them will click any link in any email that has either "PayPal" or a misspelling of "Viagra" in it and enter their social security number, mother's maiden, credit card number, address, and waist/inseam sizes.
is it just me or do these guys' post seem to reek of quite a bit of arrogance?
Great that they're 'making something people want' but their posts are generally condescending -- stop the incessant chatter and show off this amazing product you've built for 'normal' people that is going to change the world and be uber-profitable.
It might just be you. This post seems pretty clearly to be from someone who get Geoffrey A. Moore's thesis in "Crossing the Chasm" - there are a VAST number of consumers out there that are NOT techie/early adopters and don't understand things in the way that we techie/early adopters do. If you don't plan on how to include that segment, then your startup is in trouble.
I agree. I am trying to find a dead simple digital camera for my parents (both on their 60s), that also takes some good quality pictures.
Imposible to find, and it seems that newer versions just cram more features into, things that my parents will never be able to figure out, or use them properly.
I got the inspiration for this post after talking to some non-tech people about how they find and use new software. You realize that they live in a different world, without all the chatter.
I'm not implying that what we're doing is going to shake the foundations of the planet, because it won't -- simply relaying what I'm thinking about as we work.
It was a solid post -- I'm all for finding real 'paying' customers, as well -- just seems that some of the posts are prodding other web app startups (a lot of your fellow YC compadres actually).
- some item
- another item
- ...
- oh yeah, and REALLY IMPORTANT POINT
contains condescension inherently. It says "the last point is the core of my post and is so important that you must know it. See how I faked almost-forgetting-it to clearly show how trivial it is to me. Be thankful that I deigned to hand it down to you instead of just throwing it away."
"Normal", in this sense just describes an imaginary HCD pseudo-human. There is no such thing. There was once a time when normal people didn't have computers, cell-phones, tv's, radios, cars, refrigerators... you get the idea.
Don't fear the niche, or the early adopter. Today's weird geek toy might be tomorrow's necessity.
This is the exact audience and mindset we are using in designing our product.
If you're young (like me), another way to think of this would be to ask yourself "why would my parents use my product? How can I make it easy and intuitive for them?"
I don't think "normal people" are as anti-Apple as this post makes them to be. Also, "normal people" are certainly much less tech-phobic than they were, say, 15 years ago.
OP, however, never mentions the most important thing about this demographic: they just want it to work.
They expect things to work intuitively right out of the box. They don't want to install any add-ons, extensions, or downloads. And they don't want to have to get an education just to try something new.
The gas pedal is always on the right and when you enter a room, flip the toggle switch up to get light.
So why doesn't your web app work like that? If it doesn't work right with the browser and resolution they got when they bought their computer at Office Depot, if they have to wait for Flash, or they don't know what it is, they'll leave and never come back.
This is the 80% in the middle of the bell curve, and they do have money to spend. Pay attention.